The College Board Retakes the SAT

The changes are the biggest the Board has made since its last major edit of the test, in 2005. In that overhaul, an essay section was added. In this overhaul, the essay will be subtracted, or at least become optional. The three-part score, with a maximum value of 2400, will revert to a two-part score, with a top value of 1600. (I wrote about the test and its history in The New Yorker last week.) The Board will drop what the Timesreferred to as “rarefied” vocabulary words, like “membranous,” in favor of more workaday words, like “synthesis.” And henceforth, each test will include a reading passage from a document like the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights.

The Board’s announcement was months—perhaps years—in the making. Suggestively, though, it came just two weeks after the release of a new study that questioned the SAT’s utility. Commissioned by the National Association for College Admissions Counseling, the study analyzed the college experiences of students at so-called test-optional schools. It found only “trivial” differences in grades and graduation rates between the students who had presented SAT scores and those who had not.

Will the re-revamp make the SATs seem more relevant? As the Declaration of Independence puts it, “We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence.”

Photograph: Comstock/Getty

Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999.